“Cure?” Volker repeated as if the word was unknown to him.
“How do we treat the infected? How do we save them?”
Volker was already shaking his head. “You can’t save them. There is no cure, no treatment, nothing. The parasites are hermaphroditic, so there’s no queen to find and kill. Each parasite is born pregnant. They begin laying eggs seconds after they hatch. They stay perpetually in the larval state, producing and laying eggs. The only way to stop that cycle is to destroy the host. That was the point.” He paused, perhaps aware of how he sounded. In a calmer voice he said, “However … if no other human goes near the corpse, then within a few weeks the larva inside the host will have consumed it. Without food, no new larvae will be born. The old larvae die off within days. Three, four weeks and the corpse is inert. But if you want to stop the ambulatory hosts, then you can do that by destroying the motor cortex or the brain stem. And then incinerate the body.”
Trout stared at him, needing all of this to be untrue, to be a lie told by a sick and delusional old man.
“I’m losing my cool here, Doc,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “I need you to tell me what you’re going to do about this.”
Volker’s face wore an expression of profound confusion. “Do? Haven’t you been listening to me? There is nothing I can do. There’s nothing you can do, either. I doubt at this point that there’s anything that the government can do. We are not sitting here discussing a response protocol. You and your friend are here as witnesses to these events. You are the historians who will tell the truth of this story. But you are witnesses only from a distance. Go back to Stebbins and you become part of the infestation. Stay here, or at least away from town and you will be able to report what I’ve told you.” He nodded toward the door as if that was a clear line to the town. “Don’t worry about Homer Gibbon. The parasites are consuming him even as we speak—”
“He could spread it across the whole goddamn country,” interrupted Goat.
“No. As I said, I told my handlers. There are people in the government who know the full potential of the Lucifer program. I’m sure all appropriate steps are being taken.”
“What do you mean by ‘appropriate’?”
The old doctor’s eyes glittered with new tears. “Exactly what you would expect that word to mean.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
WOLVERTON REGIONAL HOSPITAL
Dr. Raja Sengupta stared through the reinforced plastic window of the hazmat suit. Inside the suit the figure of Officer Andy Diviny still writhed and thrashed against the four-point restraints and canvas strapping. There was no way he could break free, but even so Sengupta was not willing to go back inside that room.
Not now. Not after the test results had come back. There was a pulse, but it beat less than once per minute. There was respiration, but so shallow that it was impossible to detect without machines. So shallow that it had to be destroying brain cells. Sengupta had seen hypoxia at a hundred different degrees of intensity, but nothing like this. There was so little blood and oxygen going to the brain that it bordered on anoxia; cellular respiration was nonfunctioning at any detectable level. Without cellular energy, tissue all over the man’s body was becoming apoptotic, turning necrotic. He was rotting like a corpse even while he growled and fought to get up.
None of which was possible. Not even with the worst coma patients.
Even that wasn’t the worst thing. That wasn’t what frightened Dr. Sengupta on the deepest levels. The blood and saliva tests were nightmarish.
His fingers trembled so badly it took him four tries to punch in the number for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
THE Q-ZONE, NORTHERN PERIMETER
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Lt. Colonel Macklin Dietrich bent over a plastic-coated map of Stebbins County. Three other officers and several aides were clustered around the table. A portable communications table had been set up against the far wall of the plastic shelter that had been erected to serve as field HQ for this operation.
He tapped the map with a forefinger. “This is the funeral home where Gibbon was taken. We’ve lost communication with the local and state police at the scene, so we can assume that it’s been compromised. However, a second wave of state troopers arrived a few minutes before we secured the perimeter. They’re on cleanup for this.”
“Sir, what do the local police know?” asked a captain.
“Nothing,” said Dietrich, “and we’re going to keep it that way.”
A major asked, “Can’t we use them as local assets?”
“No. This is not a joint operation. We do not want any bonds formed between our people and the infected.”
“May I ask why not, sir?” asked the major.
“Because we are to regard anyone inside the Q-zone as potentially and indeed probably infected.” Dietrich sighed. “I know how you must all feel. I feel the same. These are American citizens and they didn’t ask for this. This is a goddamn tragedy. Our sympathies and the sympathies of the men under our command are going to naturally be with these people.”
The major shook his head. “We’ve been trained to help the civilian population, not stand aside and watch them die.”
“This isn’t something anyone’s been trained for, Major,” said Dietrich. “This is a worst-case scenario that should not have happened. But it has happened and it’s up to us to contain this inside the Stebbins County line. We drop the ball and we’re going to need a mass grave the size of the Grand Canyon to bury the dead.”
The officers glanced at one another in horrified silence.
“What are the safety regs on this?” asked the captain.
Dietrich said, “Containment and sterilization are the only options they gave us to work with. We’re running without safety measures, and they tell me we don’t have a viable treatment. These parasites make ebola look like a weak dose of the clap. We’re talking about something that is one hundred percent infectious and one hundred percent terminal.” He looked around and watched the truth and its implications bury spikes in each of the officers. “So, the hard news is that everyone who is infected is not only terminal, they are a very real and substantial threat to the rest of the country.”
The major made a disgusted face. “So—they want us to go in there, lock it all down, and flush it? Seven thousand people?”
Dietrich leaned on the table and stared hard into the major’s eyes. “Yes. No exceptions. You see your own mother in town and she’s infected, you put a bullet in her goddamn brain.”
“What if she’s not infected, sir?” asked the captain.
Dietrich’s eyes were bleak. “Everyone in Stebbins is infected.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
MASON STREET NEAR DOLL FACTORY ROAD
“God,” whispered JT in a sick voice, “they’re coming.”
Dez crept up beside him and peered around the corner of the mailbox. A hundred and fifty yards up the long slope of Doll Factory Road, emerging like ghosts from the gathering mist, came the creatures. Even from here, even without seeing their dead eyes or the wounds that had killed them, it was clear they were not people. Not anymore. They lumbered like animated scarecrows, their limbs stiff and awkward. It hurt Dez’s heart to accept that these things existed at all. They were nightmare creatures; they didn’t belong in the waking world. It hurt her worse that she knew so many of them, and would have to kill as many as she could.
She sniffed back tears. Beside her, JT banged his head on the cold metal of the mailbox. Once, again, and again. He stopped when a sob hitched in his chest.
Dez wrapped her arm around him and hugged him and for a moment they squatted there, foreheads pressed together, refugees in a world that no longer belonged to them.
“What are they?” he begged. “Are they people?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Hoss. God, I really don’t know.”
The wind blew down the hill toward them and Dez watched it whip an empty plastic grocery bag past them. She followed it with her eyes and saw the lights of the diner. There were at least a dozen cars in the lot.
“We got a problem,” she murmured and JT followed the line of her gaze.
“What?”
Dez chewed her lip, looking around. The intersection was on the very edge of town. There were a few decaying factories from the town’s more prosperous era, including the crumbling remains of the factory that gave the road its name. There were other stores and businesses beyond the diner. If the creatures went that way it would be a slaughter. The southern end of the cross street, Mason, led only to a corn farm, and the farmhouse was two miles away. Six hundred yards to the north, right at a bend in the road, was Bell’s Tools and Hardware. Even at this distance they could see half a dozen cars and pickup trucks in the lot, too.
“Talk to me, kid,” said JT. The shambling mass of the dead was halfway down the hill.
“We can’t let those things get to the diner,” said Dez. “We have to stop them here until the staties get here.”
“We can’t,” said JT. “We don’t have the ammunition for that.”
“Then we have to draw them away.” She nudged him and nodded toward Bell’s.
“There are people down there, too.”
“Yeah, but Bell’s is a blockhouse, solid as a rock. Not much past it, either. Just farms and no one’s going to be planting seeds with this storm coming.”
The rain was still only a drizzle and through the noise they could hear moans. Even with the slow gait of the creatures, the distance was closing fast. Not all of the dead were slow … a few loped along at an awkward run.
JT studied her for a moment. He flicked a glance at the shambling dead—still hundreds of yards away—and then at Bell’s. Dez was right about the hardware store—it was a squat cinder block building with roll-down steel shutters. They could hold off the legions of hell in there.